


that's why i gave up on music

by burntmint



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dreambubbles, F/M, Matespriteship - Freeform, redrom
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:54:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23746384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burntmint/pseuds/burntmint
Summary: a collection of shorts centered around dave ♡ nepeta--previews at the beginning of each chapter
Relationships: Nepeta Leijon/Dave Strider
Comments: 10
Kudos: 20





	1. therefore, you and i

**Author's Note:**

> Its a quiet kind of day, the ones that fill you with dread that a man wearing gloves and shades will come walking through your door at any moment.

Your name is Dave Strider, and you are alone with your girlfriend in your room.

Well, its mostly your room. The dreambubble itself tends to shift and warp between your shitty texan apartment and the cold and unforgiving cavern of her home. Nepeta’s splayed across your bed, tail flicking back and forth, your sheets twisted up around her body. Its a quiet kind of day, the ones that fill you with dread that a man wearing gloves and shades will come walking through your door at any moment.

But you know, realistically, that it won’t happen. That side of the room is all lush forest, red stone. Strange, technicolor flora and twin moons in equally unnatural colors. You lean on a piece of your wall that fused to the tall trunk of a tree, shooting for casual and ending up looking like you need to piss. Her eyes catch yours, as they always seem to do when you’re in this weird, unsettled mood.

“I want to scrape the meat from your bones,” She says, and means it. “I want to crawl inside of you, hollow out a space just for me, and live in your skin.” You don't answer back to her fervent, near _reverent_ calls. You wonder if she’s capable of loving anything in half-measures. 

“I want to keep your eyes in a pocket, so when I look down I will always see you.” Her breath curls coldly against the night air, eyes glazed green and pink in the moonlight. Nepeta is no longer on the bed, but walking you in circles, until your feet brush against your old turntables. She’s so close you can count the fine, hairline scars on her face. “There would be nothing that could tear you from me, if it were like that.”

And it _is_ romantic, in that trollish way that equates acts of extreme violence and the painful idealization of blood as a catalyst for romance, but you aren’t a troll. Nepeta’s claws, her skin, her horns-- they are all reminders of her foreign, alien nature, and you curl your fingers into the muscle of her arms. Just the way you know she likes it, on the edge of painful. 

Your shades aren’t doing anything to hide your fear, your affection. You think you might be the only person in the entire universe who could look at the way her teeth are bared and see the feelings she has for you underneath it.

“I would let you,” you say, and feel her go boneless against your front, pushing you bodily against the wall, crushing the memory of your turntables underneath your ass. Her eyes glimmer with that unusual, uniquely troll quality. “You could carve me up and truss me over a fire, and I’d let you.”

Nepeta’s sigh is like shrapnel lodged in your chest, and you bring your hand up to the back of her head, grip into her hair like she’s the only thing keeping you upright.

“But I won’t,” She says to you, voice strange and airy. “I wouldn’t have you to talk to if I took you apart. So we can stay like this.”

You nod, and bring her head into your throat, and let your shoulders slump.

Sometimes it feels like a gamble, with her, but you can’t imagine anything differently between the two of you.


	2. you're not dead yet, so please howl out your thoughts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Before anything else, you see the tubes. Old, filled with the rotted and dilapidated corpses of Carapace soldiers. _‘From the battleground,’_ you think, lifting up the end of your cape to avoid the sticky-brown of dried blood and bodily fluids. _‘Fucking gross.’_

Your name is Dave Strider, and you’re doing some long-overdue exploring.

Things around the meteor have been slow-- slower than the usual, glacial pace, it feels like. Rose is lost in herself, hanging all over Kanaya; and annoying Karkat and dicking around in the Mayor’s rooms can only entertain you so much. After a while, it starts to feel more than a little boring. To be frank, you feel like gouging your own eyes out with a spoon. Which is… not an ideal mental state to be in, all things considered.

That leads you to your aimless wandering, one hand dragging along the cool metal of the wall as you make rounds near the not-so-travelled parts of this flying deathtrap. The lights flicker and the floor creaks here, ominous and strange, and it makes the hairs on your neck stand on end just passing through. It vaguely reminds you of the hallways up to the roof of your apartment during the winter-- chilly, enclosed. 

Isolated. 

Your heart stutters when you think you hear a noise behind one of the larger doors. There’s a broken keypad at the side, smashed-in and fizzing from the remnant power being pumped to the poor shattered device. The doors themselves are half-open, like the power to the machinery got cut off just as it was closing. With a swallow, you push open the metal the rest of the way, floating over the threshold into a large room. 

Before anything else, you see the tubes. Old, filled with the rotted and dilapidated corpses of Carapace soldiers. _‘From the battleground,’_ you think, lifting up the end of your cape to avoid the sticky-brown of dried blood and bodily fluids. _‘Fucking gross.’_

The streak of much fresher, redder blood is why you pause, following the trail with your eyes to another door-- this time firmly closed. Your hands feel sweaty, as if your palms decided to go on their own personal vacation to mars, and you wipe them on your pants before you try the keypad to the right of the door. It doesn’t seem to take a code anymore-- just blinks bright green before sliding open with a mechanical hiss.

“Someone finally come looking for me?” A voice rumbles from past the door, yellow eyes glowing in the dark corners of the room. 

You think that, maybe, you can hear the groaning whir of some kind of machine, but a quick glance around dispels that idea. Most all of the old carapace cloning machines were broken down when you entered, nothing here could be working. You don’t think you’ve ever heard that voice before, your spine going ramrod straight as the metal doors slide shut behind you.

“Well?”

You bite your lip. “Uh. Sorry if I’m disturbing something. Was just explorin’.”

A long, painful silence follows, as if the other person in the room (troll, it has to be another troll) was assessing if they knew you, too. Your feet touch the ground lightly, more than aware of the blood trail that led you here in the first place. Then, a shuffle of fabric, and you see her.

“...you’re one of the humans.”

Her voice doesn’t shake, doesn’t waver. She just pierces you with that dulled, painful stare, one eye half-forced shut from scarring. Its painful to look at, even as she stalks closer, with the fluorescents casting her in sickly white light. There’s part of her scalp that looks concave, bashed in with a blunt object, and you want to vomit as much as you want to help. 

You don’t know her name.

“Awful, right?” She tries for a smile, but it’s lopsided and lacking any kind of warmth or mirth, no brightness left to it. Her hands are dirty from whatever she’d dragged in from the next room, claws long and sharp and you feel your heart clench behind your ribs. “I never got to meet any of you.”

“I’m Dave,” you say, for lack of any great revelations. “Strider.”

“Oh!” The troll girl seems to brighten up, eyes crinkling in recognition and perhaps even the barest glimmer of joy. “I know you! We roleplayed together. I’m Nepeta!”

Her grin is caked with dried blood, but you offer a non-committal nod of your head back. In some vague, distant way, you can recall making up a fursona and going balls-to-the-wall crazy in a roleplay with some weird catgirl troll. 

“Sup.”

* * *

After you get over her grisly appearance, Nepeta’s not bad company. She pulls you by the hand over to a darker corner of the room, walking backwards with a painful looking gait, some broken looking blue thing trailing behind her; she comes to a stop at a haphazard pile of metal crates, pushed together to resemble a table and chairs. There is something pointedly not living on the table.

“Sorry, I’ve never had a guest before.” She laughs, pulling herself up onto a box. “What brings you out here? I haven’t seen Terezi or Karkat or anyone in ages.”

You furrow your brow, mimicking her and sitting down. “...I didn’t know nobody had been by. Does… do they know you’re here?”  
  
Nepeta’s smile drops, her hands clenched in her lap. “...Terezi should. I think… I think she saw me, then.”

“When was the last time you’ve seen someone in this part of the meteor?” You ask, immediately wishing to be swallowed up by the floor.

“...” Dragging herself off the crate, she pulls herself over to a set of monitors, tapping the keys to bring up a clock and a date. Her shoulders seem to droop in the green glow from the results, what you now recognize as a tail curling tightly against the floor. “...a sweep or two.”

You cross your legs, then uncross them because you don’t want to seem tense. “Hey now,” you try. “Come back on over here.”

She does.

* * *

Nepeta tells you that she was seeking out her moirail. That his name was Equius, and he was meant to be talking to Gamzee and talking him down from a murderous rampage. That, when she found him, he’d been strangled to death on his own bowstring. “He was just lying there, stupid smile on this blue face, and I couldn’t even see for how angry I was. I just acted.”

“What’d you do?”

“I lunged.” she says. Claws out, teeth bared. “He broke my wrist. Used it to scratch his own face. _Mocking_ me.” Nepeta pulls her legs up to rest on the box. “He beat me to unconsciousness with those juggling clubs he carries around."

You avoid looking at the dent in her head. 

“Some time after that, I came to. Not like, able to move, but I was aware of my surroundings.” She moves her hand in an arc at the room. “I saw Terezi’s shoes, but I don’t think she knew I was alive. I don’t think _I_ knew I was alive. I just… floated there for days.”

It doesn’t sit right with you, but you keep your mouth shut. You carry that with you when you leave, with a promise to return in a day or two. 

She asks for paint.

* * *

You don’t end up saying anything to the rest of them. 

What would that even sound like? _‘Oh, hey, I went and gave the meteor a deep-dive-colonoscopy, and guess what I found? A half-dead troll who looked like she met the bad end of a woodchipper!’_

Yeah, that’d go over well. 

So you keep it to yourself, and you don’t say much of anything during the mandatory meeting times, and you grab a set of paints you scrounge up from around the meteor. They look old, and used, but you figure some are better than none. For good measure, you drag some of the blankets and pillows from the communal room when you make your way back to Nepeta, a day late.

* * *

She nearly takes you out on the ground when you come in unannounced.

“Jesus fucking _christ_ ,” you grumble, the too-light weight of Nepeta pinning you to the ground.

“Oh!” she scrambles off of you, grabbing onto the front of your jammies and tugging you up. “I didn’t realize it was you, sorry. I get kinda jumpy.”

Dusting off your cape, you shrug, and say “No biggie.”

“...I thought you weren’t coming back,” Nepeta says in this half-whisper, half-warble, and you feel strange and sad and you put your hand on her good shoulder, leading her back into her room.

“Nah, just looking for paints.” You wiggle the things out of your sylladex-- the blankets, the pillows, the paint set. “Could only find this used one, though.”

You spend the rest of the day drawing all over the walls-- absurdist commentaries on the game, hot political takes neither of you understand, crude scribblings of genitalia. Her laugh is like a half-broken wind chime, but you don’t mind.

* * *

From then on, you try to make it out into the depths of the meteor at least twice a week. Its a nice break from the usual dragging drama of the common room, and you can’t say that you haven’t ducked out to avoid Rose’s drunk rambling more than once. You’re hauling a whole television in your sylladex today, your pockets stuffed full of movies you can’t read the titles of.

Nepeta stopped tackling you to the ground upon arrival a while ago, but you still avoid standing directly in front of the door anyway.   
“Welcome back!” she shouts from beyond the creaking metal deathtrap that she’s holed herself up in. “Pop it anywhere and we can hook it up to the power supply. I can’t believe you agreed to a movie day!”

 _‘I would agree to anything,’_ you don’t say. 

“...’course.” 

Chucking the giant television out of your sylladex, Nepeta crawls behind it to plug it in to the power. The first few movies are ‘cult classics’, or so she’d claimed-- you’re having a hard time following any of the convoluted plot-lines that flash across the screen. 

Somewhere between the fifth and tenth film, Nepeta’s curled up on your lap like a common house-cat, and you’re idly petting through the matted mess of her hair.

If you fall asleep, and don’t make it back before breakfast, at least everyone has the decency to shut up.

* * *

“So,” Kanaya says, arms crossed and leaning on the edge of the table. “Where have you been sneaking off to?”

Sputtering into your shitty, oily coffee, you turn towards the tall troll who looks half-bored. Kanaya’s presence was stifling even on a good day, and she’s glowing in a way that feels pointedly suspicious.

“..I dunno what you mean.” You heft yourself up onto the counter, real chill like. You haven’t done anything wrong, after all. Or. Well, you’ve done lots of things wrong, but not recently.

Looking pressed, Kanaya takes two long strides over to you, brows pinched. “You’ve been sneaking about the meteor. Did you forget that I patrol?”

You did. “Right. I’m just.” your hands make an attempt at describing how you feel for you. “Wandering. I’m bored.”

“It’s dangerous. _He’s_ still out there, honking around in the vents. From what Rose has said, he has a particularly violent grudge against you.”

To be honest, the fact that Gamzee fucking hated your guts completely slipped your mind. But he was just… _one_ clown. You can handle that. “I’m a tough dude, Maryam, but I’m flattered you think I’m that soft.”

Exasperated, she clicks her way over to the door, arms thrown up into the air. “Just-- don’t be as much of an idiot as usual.”

* * *

When you talk to Nepeta about it, she gets quiet. Contemplative, even.

“I’m just saying, I can take on one deranged juggalo clown.” You slump into the pillow pile, sinking into it when Nepeta throws her body across your abdomen. “I’m not made of glass. I didn’t get these sick PJs by being a huge pussy. Besides, I’m sure he doesn’t remember any of the shit that made him angry at me.” 

“My moirail thought that, too. So did I, and I barely escaped with my life.” You can feel her breathing. A rattling, shaking sort of sound. It sounds painful, and you wonder if her ribs are broken, healed over wrong.

But you stay silent, and she pulls herself up, locking eyes with you.

"Trolls aren't like humans," Nepeta says, tone rough and low, dangerous. "You seem to be thinking that we're just like you. But we're not." Her claws seem to glimmer in the artificial light. 

Had she always been so cold? Wasn’t there a time when they were sending silly, absurd roleplay messages to each other? 

You clench your hands into fists, perhaps subconsciously. 

After all, not a single person had thought to check here all these years later.

"Some trolls? They're inherently evil. Bloodlust is as ingrained in us as having mutant blood is for humans." You can see the gnarled, nasty looking scar taking up most of her face; its more green than the other, faded out scars that line her jawline, her lips. The crooked twist of her tail whines behind her as she drags herself a bit farther from you. “Some trolls aren’t designed to fit into a human standard.”

“Why are you telling me this?” You ask, adjusting your shades and sitting up. The air in this old room feels stale and stifling, now. “What are you getting at?”

Here Nepeta pauses, half-hidden in the darkness of the room. You can see where the blood that dried on her skin never rubbed off, caked and flaking with the twitch of her muscles. “...maybe nothing. Maybe I just wanted to make sure you knew what it meant to sit idly by.” 

Half-covered in the fluorescents, she looks rabid. With a wide eye, a curled lip revealing the sharpness of her teeth. Without thinking, you reach behind your back, ready to call a sword to your hands.

But she sees you, and pounces. The impact would’ve hurt more if the whole room wasn’t covered in every soft and squishy thing you nabbed from the meteor bedrooms. The sword is in your hands when she lifts upwards, claws gripping into the front of your shirt.

“Fuck-- Nepeta--” you move to scramble backwards, to put distance between the two of you-- “What the fuck!!”

Her grin isn’t the widest you’ve seen it, but it is the most frightening. There are things that you overlook when spending time in close quarters with an alien species, and you forgot just how… unnaturally insectoid they are. It looks like she could unhinge her jaw if she wanted to. The sound of metal sliding against metal was loud in your ears as she unsheathes her own weapon.

Claws. Of course. God, she’s so committed to the cat thing.

You duck and roll out from under her when she slashes at you, tearing three perfect lines through the poor cushion you’d been laying on. Rest in peace, brave soldier.

Dancing around each other, you bat at her metal claws each time she leaps to cut at you, twisting your forms around and away from each other until you’re pinned in the darkest corner of the room, throat bared. The metal is cold.

“Maybe I wanted to see for myself how easy it would be to scare you.” Nepeta heaves, out of breath, sounding much less scary than she had ten minutes ago. “That’s how fast it can be, Strider. God or not, he could get you.” 

Patiently, you wait until she backs off, dragging herself back to the pile.

“Come here.” She says, no room for arguments.

* * *

You talk about life before the end of the world.

Nepeta tells you about her cave. How she had two drones dig it out, and then was left there to be raised by her lusus. The only reason she was able to talk to other trolls at all was because she managed to salvage tech from the ransacked town some hundred mile equivalent down from the highlands. How she got no formal education, and everything she knows about Alternia’s history was from Equius or movies. 

“More than anything,” she sighs, head pillowed on your stomach. “I was lonely. There weren’t any other trolls that far up the mountains.”

It’s terribly, awfully relatable.

“I lived up on the highest apartment in my building,” you scratch behind her horn on her good side, feeling her go a little boneless. “Just me and my Bro. I was only allowed to leave for school, but after a while he decided to homeschool me. Wasn’t really an education that would’ve served me back on Earth, but nobody gave a shit.”

Vaguely, you’re aware that she’s kneading your knee. 

The rest of your life's story basically slips out of your lips in a rapid, tumbling rush. To her credit, Nepeta listens intently, her eyes turned up towards the reflective surface of your shades. You bite out how the game has been so, so freeing in that way. The way that gets you away from what hurts you most.

“Yeah,” she mumbles, reaching up towards your shades. You flinch, just a bit, and she pulls her hands back. “...but its a lot like trading one monster for another.”

* * *

One day, you go to look for Nepeta, and she isn’t there. 

For one, horrible moment, your heart catches in your throat. It must’ve been Gamzee, discovering her and taking her to be slaughtered--

You push open the broken metal doors, sending out three different Daves to search the expansive rooms, but all of them come up empty. “Fuck. FUCK!” you dig through the pillows, check under the shitty table that you’d fixed up ages ago. The more you look, the higher your panic rises, and before you realize what you’re doing, you fly out of the room and down the hallway. 

Maybe, if you’re fast enough, you can rewind her body to a point before she was injured. Then you can go back to your new normalcy-- cuddling in absurd amounts of pillows and blankets, watching shitty troll movies, edging on the strange side of aggressive and domestic in the place only you two know about. 

The next thing you know, you’re colliding with someone, sending you both sprawling to the floor.

“What the fresh _FUCK_ , Strider--” Damnit, of all the people, it just had to be the resident angry asshole.

“Shut up, I don’t have time for this!” You yell, louder than you mean to. Karkat looks at you sideways, strangely, like you have your head on wrong, or like you sprouted several new limbs. You check to make sure you haven’t.

“What could you possibly be doing that needs you to fly around like a wriggler out of the caverns?” 

The halls around you look familiar, and you’re not sure who you were even going to get. Rose? Kanaya? Terezi, wherever she is? You look down your nose at the short troll, your silence clearly aggravating him. Fuck it.

“Nepeta’s not in her room!”

By the way his scowl slides solidly into confusion, you can tell this is a waste of time. 

“How do you even know who that is--”

You’re already turned around, speeding back off in the direction you came from, trying the opposite approach.

* * *

When you come upon her, she’s curled up at the foot of a metal box, turned on its side. By the wailing, she’s crying. That’s all it takes before you fly over, pulling her bodily from the ground, fearing the absolute worst--

Nepeta’s fine. Well. As fine as she’s ever been since you met her. Her face is streaked with tears and thick, blue liquid, and you have a sinking feeling in your gut.

“He-- he took--” She clings to you as you set yourself down, her legs unable to support her weight. “His head! He took his head!”

You almost ask who she means, but this isn’t your first rodeo. A quick glance over to the box reveals the remains of Equius, decaying arm splayed out onto the floor. There’s… well, you hesitate to call it ‘fresh’ blood. The body’s clearly been tampered with.

“I came down to-- to visit, and it was open and his--” Nepeta digs her claws into you, as if it would make things better. Maybe it would, for her. 

You can’t hear anything over the ringing in your ears.

“Shhh.” You kneel, and hold her, and lift her up under the knees. “I’m sorry.”

Fat load of shit a ‘sorry’ will do, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> god this was the most self indulgent i've been in a hot second


End file.
